A group of leading automotive and technology industry companies including Arm, Bosch, Continental, Denso, General Motors, Nvidia, NXP Semiconductors and Toyota have joined forces to help accelerate the delivery of safe and affordable autonomous vehicles (AVs) at scale.
The new Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC) is committed to making fully self-driving vehicles a reality through industry-level collaboration. Bringing together leaders from the vehicle manufacturing, automotive supply, semiconductor and computing industries, the consortium aims to promote the scalable deployment of automated and autonomous vehicles. The first step toward achieving this vision and the common objective of the AVCC is to develop a set of recommendations of a system architecture and a computing platform that reconciles the performance requirements of autonomous systems with the vehicle-specific requirements and limitations in terms of size, temperature range, power consumption and safety. These recommendations will be specially developed to move AVs from current prototype systems to deployment at scale.
Member companies understand the technological complexities and obstacles to overcome for the deployment of AVs. They aim to work together to enable solutions that address these challenges and create an ecosystem of industry experts to focus on innovations that to meet these goals. Working groups will share ideas and study common technological challenges, facilitating cross-industry collaboration to help the automotive industry work together by defining, educating and publishing the results for the benefit of all. The new Consortium is calling on all interested parties, and members of the automotive ecosystem worldwide to join the organization and share their R&D advances with the industry’s technical community.
“The massive amount of technological innovation required to power fully self-driving vehicles at scale requires collaboration at an industry level,” said Massimo Osella, chairman of the AVCC board, and lab group manager for R&D at General Motors. “We are delighted to join this group of key leaders in the automotive industry. As the AVCC, we are working together to create the ‘go to’ organization for autonomous computing expertise to help bring this technology to market.”
Dipti Vachani, SVP and general manager of Arm’s automotive and IoT business, said, “The future of mobility and the safe, scalable deployment of advanced driver assistance systems to fully autonomous vehicles for mass production requires unprecedented industry collaboration. The AVCC brings together leaders from across the automotive industry landscape to tackle complex foundational technological and computing challenges to accelerate our path to a truly autonomous future.”
Nvidia’s SVP of automotive hardware and software systems, Gary Hicok, said, “The hardware and software requirements for autonomous vehicles are enormous, requiring an energy-efficient, high-performance AI platform to process sensor data and achieve the highest levels of safety. As the leader in AI computing, we are working closely with transportation innovators, tackling the complexities of developing and deploying safe autonomous vehicles at scale.”
Takuya Fukushima, AVCC board member and part of Denso’s AD and ADAS electronics engineering division, added, “We are looking forward to creating a shared platform to focus innovation as part of the AVCC. The consortium brings together expertise, knowledge and innovation with a shared goal and focused strategy. It will facilitate and manage work groups to share ideas and study common technological challenges.” 
